Remove author dropdown from Manage Posts

[westi]

The consensus on #3120 was that Manage Posts should not have an author dropdown as it didn't scale well for blogs with a large number of authors.

The reasoning was that we have a good UI method of accessing this view already via the [users.php page ​http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3120#comment:8]

Therefore we should remove the authors dropdown that currently appears on Manage -> Posts.

Also the action for adding your own filters has moved to be above the page heading which makes a plugin place it's UI in the wrong place.

[westi]

Patch to remove the authors dropdown and move the action to a better place.

[ryan]

The author filter allows editors to separate out drafts from different contributors, so it would be nice to keep the capability to filter by author. Note that we have the same potential problem with categories. Some blogs have thousands of categories. Perhaps we could show the dropdown if there are less than so many authors or categories (say 200) and show a text input otherwise.

[westi]

Replying to ryan:

The author filter allows editors to separate out drafts from different contributors, so it would be nice to keep the capability to filter by author. Note that we have the same potential problem with categories. Some blogs have thousands of categories. Perhaps we could show the dropdown if there are less than so many authors or categories (say 200) and show a text input otherwise.

Agreed.

It just seemed strange for it to appear now when it was said before that it didn't scale and we already had a good way of accessing the info.

Whatever the outcome of the author dropdown we do need to move the action hook as I did in my patch above so that it is back in a more sensible place.

I think my prefered solution for authors / categories / any other large lists would be to look at alternative user interfaces which provide better access methodology.

Maybe a cloud style display for terms (tags/cats/...) which is within an expandable twisty.

[westi]

Screenshot showing why we need to move the action hook

[westi]

This is why we need to move the action hook:

The first Browse Author.. dropdown is added by a plugin - previously this appeared as part of the normal filtering under the H2

[JeremyVisser]

I don't get it. How then are you going to transfer ownership of a post to a different user?

[JeremyVisser]

Would it scale better to make the author box more like the category box (multiple authors, hint hint)?

[rob1n]

(In [5607]) Move the restrict_manage_posts hook to somewhere more reasonable. see #4359

[westi]

Replying to JeremyVisser:

I don't get it. How then are you going to transfer ownership of a post to a different user?

You do that on the Edit Post page not on the manage post page so I can't see how this is affected.

[westi]

Replying to rob1n:

(In [5607]) Move the restrict_manage_posts hook to somewhere more reasonable. see #4359

Cheers rob1n

[JeremyVisser]

Replying to westi:

Replying to JeremyVisser:

I don't get it. How then are you going to transfer ownership of a post to a different user?

You do that on the Edit Post page not on the manage post page so I can't see how this is affected.

Oh, I was totally confused. I though you were talking about the Edit Post screen. Sorry.

[rob1n]

I'm not very attracted to the prospect of completely removing the author filter dropdown. While it may not scale well for sites with lots of authors, the majority of sites out there are small-scale and would be fine with the dropdown.

That said, the use of a text box to replace that in larger sites doesn't appeal to me, either. IMO a guide (such as an autocomplete) would be good with that, but I don't know how to bring that off well.

[westi]

Closing this.

The hook has been moved to a more reasonable place.

And the consensus seemed to be to keep the Author dropdown.